Americans buy a lot of stuff on the Internet — more than $262 billion worth last year, according to the Commerce Department. These days consumers can order pretty much anything online, including what they wear on their wedding day.

Dan Stover and his wife, Megan, got married a year ago this month. In the photos, the groom and his groomsmen are sporting seersucker bow ties, yellow boutonnieres and slim gray suits. “You can see it’s quality fabric,” says Stover. “It’s not like it’s polyester or something.”

The suits were rentals, but not from a strip mall chain store. They came in the mail a week before the wedding, from TheBlackTux.com.

“First thing I did was rip that thing open and I tried it on,” Stover says. “I wanted to see if this was a total disaster or a home run, and the fit was perfect. For our wedding, maybe it was a little bit of a leap of faith.”

The Black Tux is a web-only retailer, so Stover couldn’t try his suit on in advance. But the site lets customers enter their body type and measurements, then runs the information through an algorithm to fine-tune the fit before shipping. Stover says the customer reviews were good, and as a busy medical fellow, he was used to buying clothes online to save time. He says he also saved his five best friends a lot of money.

“It was like $100 and change. That’s less than renting a standard tux, and far less than buying a suit.”

Without the cost of running retail stores, web-only companies can invest more in their products and sell them for less. The Black Tux launched last year and just wrapped its first full wedding season, with inventory fully booked as much as two months in advance.

“I think absolutely that signals a huge consumer shift,” says Andrew Blackmon, co-founder of The Black Tux. “If people are able to trust us with the tuxedo rentals for arguably the most important day of their lives, I think that shows that people are adopting e-commerce at a level that they probably weren’t in the last five years.”

The top 200 web-only retailers (excluding Amazon) racked up almost $38 billion in sales last year — up 22 percent from the year before, according to InternetRetailer.com.

“There’s another trend that’s underlying this as well, which is our willingness, maybe even preference to rent things instead of buying them outright,” says David Bell, professor of marketing and e-commerce at the University of Pennsylvania. His case in point: Rent the Runway. The website launched for women in 2009, renting designer dresses for as little as $30. The company now has more than 5 million members and just added a monthly rental program. It has been called a "Netflix for clothes."

“Firms have [gotten] better about giving us pre-information through better technology, better pictures, free returns and so on,” Bell says. “So I think we’ve gradually been trained to buying almost anything online.”

A new report from Business Insider shows 18- to-34-year-olds still spend more money online than any other age group, and in that demographic, 40 percent of guys and a third of women say they would “ideally buy everything online.”

Dan Stover says he’d recommend renting a wedding suit from the web to almost anyone.

His wife, Megan, approves, too. “I think he looked quite handsome, and I thought the suits looked amazing,” she says.

As for her wedding dress, she felt more comfortable getting it the old-fashioned way — from a store.

]]>Tue, 09 Sep 2014 20:41:49 GMTCelebrities get out of the prepaid card businesshttp://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/celebrities-get-out-prepaid-card-business

When it comes to celebrity endorsements, there are plenty of success stories. Michael Jordan’s name brought in more than $2 billion for Nike last year, and back in May, Apple paid $3 billion to snap up rapper Dr. Dre’s Beats.

But there are some things a famous name just can’t seem to sell. Case in point: prepaid debit cards.

Magic Johnson and financial adviser Suze Orman pulled their prepaid cards about a month ago. Lil Wayne appears to be the latest celebrity to bow out. Try applying online for the Young Money card he endorsed, and you get an error page.

"This was sort of low-hanging fruit," says Matt Britton, CEO of the marketing agency MRY. "Prepaid cards is a growing phenomenon, so I think celebrities initially saw this as a great opportunity for 'me to be able to leverage my fan base.'"

Consumer spending with prepaid cards jumped 6 percent last year to more than $118 billion, according to the Nilson Report.The cards are increasingly popular with people who don’t want traditional checking accounts - and those who can't get them.

Hidden fees helped tank the Kardashian family’s attempt at a prepaid card a few years ago, and more cards now disclose their costs.

"The lack of regulation is the downside," says Susan Weinstock, director of consumer banking for the Pew Charitable Trusts. "These cards do not have any protection should you lose the card or it gets stolen."

Weinstock says federal regulators plan to weigh in on prepaid cards this summer. As for whether celebrities should keep endorsing them, Britton says it takes a star with a "pristine brand" and a broad enough fan base to make it work.

"LeBron James, maybe, especially since his move to Cleveland," she says.

One of the country’s most successful regional grocery chains is holding a job fair on Monday. Massachusetts-based Market Basket is looking to replace employees who’ve been holding protests and asking customers to boycott its stores.

Two weeks into the rallies, it’s like the aftermath of a snowstorm in New England - dozens of Market Basket stores with slim pickings and few customers.

It's not low wages or high prices the workers are upset about; they just want their old boss back. Ousted CEO Arthur T. Demoulas famously kept prices low and paid a living wage, plus provided good benefits and profit-sharing. Now, workers and Market Basket customers alike worry the company's new leaders, under "Artie T's" cousin, will change all that.

"This is not a protest against the company, it’s a protest to save the company," says Thomas Kochan, Co-Director of MIT’s Institute for Work and Employment Research. "You have store managers, clerical employees, and warehouse workers all coalescing together to take this action. That's unprecedented."

Market Basket’s new CEOs say they'll welcome those workers back, and the company won't change its "unmatched compensation and benefits." But they warn that employees who keep up the protest could lose pay, and even their jobs.

"There's definitely a tension between the competing interests and priorities of shareholders, employees and customers," says Katherine Smith, Executive Director of theCenter for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College.

She says shareholders of profitable companies like Market Basket have a rightful expectation to liquidity, but Smith adds that the low cost chain won its edge in part by putting employees ahead of profits.

"More and more we see companies struggling with the question of not only am I helping to create the world I want to do business in, but also the world I want to live in," she says.

Whichever way Market Basket goes, Smith says CEOs around the country are watching.

CLARIFICATION: This story was clarified to better reflect Katherine Smith's analysis of Market Basket's responsibility to its shareholders.

The housing crash sent many construction workers fleeing to other industries. Now that housing is recovering, builders are struggling with a shortage of skilled workers. That’s delaying housing starts and driving up home prices.

The housing market continues to recover along with the overall economy, but the construction workers who left the industry in droves during the recession aren’t exactly flocking back. Meanwhile, a shortage of skilled workers is getting worse. But can you blame them for leaving in the first place?

The National Association of Home Builders reports that unemployment among construction workers peaked at 22 percent during the recession.

No wonder so many found jobs in other industries, says the group’s chief economist, David Crowe, adding that housing still seems too unstable for them to come back.

"More than half of builders are now telling us that they’re having trouble finding construction workers – carpenters, brick masons, painters and so forth," Crowe explains.

60 percent of builders the group surveyed say the shortage forced them to delay projects in the last six months, or raise home prices.

That’s not putting much of a drag on the housing market yet, says Kermit Baker, with Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies: "But with growth coming down the road in all likelihood, certainly we’re going to have serious problems in the future if we don’t train and attract more workers in the construction industry."

Baker adds that builders need to revive some of the training programs they scrapped during the long downturn, and get their “muscle memory” back for growing their workforce.

]]>Fri, 01 Aug 2014 10:00:00 GMTWhat the time of day says about your earnings reporthttp://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/what-time-day-says-about-your-earnings-report

Humana is among the companies reporting its quarterly numbers on Wednesday as earnings season continues. The health insurance giant always releases its earnings before the markets open. Whole Foods reports the same day, but the grocery chain always waits until after the closing bell.

If you've ever wondered why companies go one way or the other, it's worth noting the Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t care what time of day companies report their quarterly earnings.

So it comes down to factors like: what’s the best time to put the CEO on the phone with investors and analysts?

"Some people are morning people and some people are afternoon people," says Jeff Morgan, president of the National Investor Relations Institute. He adds that once a company picks a time, it sticks. "We want to be sure that whatever we do every quarter, we do the same thing the next quarter, so that there’s not anybody wondering why we’re making changes."

A recent study found that 66 percent of companies hold earnings calls at the same time every quarter. Co-author Elizabeth Demers, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, says executives should avoid afternoon calls, when they might be hungry and cranky.

"What we find is that as the tone of the calls becomes more negative, the share price returns are also more negative," Demers says. "In other words, the stock price responds to the negativity that's being emitted on the calls."

Demers says size matters, too; a lot of small companies reporting earnings have to take whatever slot they can get.

The 20-plus companies that are looking to go public this week hope to collectively raise about $6.7 billion dollars, with about half of it for General Electric’s consumer lending firm Synchrony Financial.

"That's going to be a $3 billion IPO, the biggest we've seen since the May, 2012 IPO of Facebook," says Kathleen Smith, a principal with the IPO fund manager Renaissance Capital. She labels Mobileye another one of this week’s "shiny objects." The company makes the technology that tells you when your car might hit the one in front of you. "It has about a 50 percent share of that market, very high growth and very profitable, so all investors are looking at that."

Smith cautions that this week’s batch of potential IPOs is a big one for the market to digest.

It’s also the right kind of market, says John E. Fitzgibbon, Jr. of IPOScoop.com.

"You’ve got to have the bull running down the street and you’ve got to have the wind at its back," he says.

Fitzgibbon thinks this year might even be the biggest one for IPOs since the dot-com bubble, but he points out that a lot of the offerings are fetching discounted prices. This week's IPO frenzy is an "End of Summer sale" that he predicts is just getting started.

"It’s like Macy’s department store; if it doesn’t sell, mark it down and drop it to the basement."

Who are all these companies, anyway? We rounded up the most notable IPOs from this record-breaking week and grouped the companies up according to their business.

Consumer financeSynchrony Financial's IPO is not only the biggest offering of the week by far, but at about $3 billion it's poised to raise more than any IPO this year. Synchrony is GE's consumer finance arm, facilitating store-brand credit cards and financing programs for big-name retailers like Amazon and Wal-Mart.

Medicine
Of the this week's huge group of IPOs, more than half are for biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms. The biggest player is Catalent, a multi-armed drug development and delivery company that's expected to offer 42.5 million shares at $19-$22 a share, according to Renaissance Capital. Catalent's nearly $1 billion deal dwarfs about a dozen other companies focused on everything from gene therapy to medical imaging to epilepsy treatment.

TechnologyMobileye is certainly a "shiny object" this week as it looks to raise half a billion dollars. The Israeli firm is the leading supplier of sensors that detect a potential collision. Investors are keeping a special eye on the company amid rumors of a potential partnership with Tesla to build self-driving cars.

Mobile gaming
It's no secret mobile gaming is big business, and developer IDreamSky has become a leader by adapting existing titles like "Fruit Ninja" and "Temple Run" for Chinese markets. That model has earned IDreamSky 100 million active users and $65 million in the year ending last March. They are looking to raise a little more than $100 million this week.

Energy
There are a handful of energy companies up for offering next week, but the largest is another big spin-off. Transocean Partners, LLC is a small portion of oil rig giant Transocean, which hopes to sell $350 million in shares. Spinning off Transocean Partner's three rigs in the Gulf of Mexico will reportedly offer Transocean more financial flexibility, but the Wall Street Journal notes this practice can be a tax dodge.

India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi outlined his first budget for the country today. Following his landslide election in May, expectations are high for Mr. Modi's plans to help revive India’s economy and jumpstart development.

But can he do enough to make India a more attractive place for foreign companies and investors? Case in point: remember when those floor-vacuuming robots came out back in 2002? Scott Miller led iRobot’s R&D in India, where he says he navigated bad roads, corruption, and time-consuming piles of paperwork.

"Working in the consumer electronics industry, schedule is everything," Miller explains. "If you miss the main holiday season you have to wait another year and that can have a profound impact on your revenue."

Now, Miller is CEO of Dragon Innovation, which guides hardware companies from prototype to high-volume manufacturing. He says he’d love to go back to India if it gets easier to make things there.

"Having as many people as India does, it could be a very credible alternative to China," he says.

Many analysts are optimistic the Modi government will be able to attract more foreign investment.

"We’ve definitely seen the financial markets react very positively to his election," says John Derrick, Director of Research at U.S. Global Investors. "So I think we’re just waiting to see if he can, you know, walk the walk as well as talk the talk."

Derrick adds that for Prime Minister Modi, it could be a long walk.

]]>Thu, 10 Jul 2014 10:00:00 GMTU.S. companies shell out more for business travelhttp://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/us-companies-shell-out-more-business-travel

When the Great Recession hit, business travel was one of the first things to go as companies looked for ways to cut back. But a new report from the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) shows employees are taking to the rails, roads, and skies again, as confidence in the economy continues to grow.

The group says American companies are booking more business trips than they were this time last year by 2.8 percent, and their employees are spending 7.6 percent more money on the road. The GBTA expects both numbers to keep going up as the economy rallies.

That pleases Harvard Business School Professor Tsedal Neeley, who studies global collaboration and co-authored a 2009 report on the potential negative consequences for business relationships when companies skimp on travel.

"I think we’re going to have healthier, more functional teams, more effective work," Neeley explains. "You can have similar effects without the face-to-face contact but it takes much longer."

So where does that leave video calls and other high tech tools for connecting remotely?

"I think a lot of companies got their toes wet with teleconferencing thinking it would eliminate travel, and really what it’s turned out to be is an extra tool for businesses to compete," says Kevin Mitchell, Executive Director of the Business Travel Coalition, an advocacy group.

The report’s most encouraging finding, Mitchell believes, is that companies are spending 7.1 percent more on conventions and other group travel – an investment that pays off longer term.

Mexico might be out of the World Cup, but this year, the country is poised to beat rival Brazil on another global stage: For the first time in a decade, Mexico is expected to become the top Latin American automobile producer. And that bodes well for its economy overall.

Consultant IHS Automotive says Mexico has been making and exporting more cars than Brazil in 2014, and it should keep up pace through the rest of the year.

Analysts point to cheaper labor and proximity to the United States, one of Mexico’s biggest customers, as contributors to the surge in auto production. There's also new investment from foreign automakers.

"Audi, Nissan, Mazda, GM, Ford and many, many others," says Shannon O’Neil, a senior fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. "These are the types of firms where you’ve seen huge growth and innovation and productivity among Mexican workers that have made it really a competitive sector."

That momentum could jump start productivity across Mexico’s economy, according to Lisa Schineller, an analyst for Standard & Poors.

"The key challenge is trying to tackle outside the manufacturing sector, and improve education, infrastructure, et cetera," she says.

Schineller adds that S&P is also watching legislative reforms that would open Mexico’s energy industry to foreign investment.

SLUG: Mexican Auto Production

REPORTER: S.Mullen (Johnston)

SHOW: MMR

Host lead: Mexico might be out of the World Cup, but the country is poised to beat rival Brazil on another global stage.

For the first time in a decade Mexico is expected to become the top Latin American automobile producer this year.

And that bodes well for Mexico’s economy overall, as Shannon Mullen reports.

* * *

MULLEN: So far this year, Mexico’s been making andexporting more cars than Brazil.

And consultant I-H-S Automotive says that should keep up through 2014.

One factor: cheaper labor. Another proximity to the U.S., one of Mexico’s biggest customers.

Then there’s all that recent investment from foreign automakers…

O’NEIL: Audi, Nissan, Mazda, GM, Ford and many many others…

MULLEN: Shannon O’Neil is a senior fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

O’NEIL: These are the types of firms where you’ve seen huge growth and innovation and productivity among Mexican workers that have made it really a competitive sector.

It's not every day that people get fired up over retirement planning, but that's what happened at AOL last month when employees lashed out over the company's move to make year-end, lump-sum contributions to their 401(k) plans instead of matches every pay period.

In the aftermath one state regulator wants to know how many other companies have made that switch. Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin says most people are less than mindful about saving for retirement. "Especially younger employees. When they get their 401(k) statement they toss it in the heap with everything else. I know I was guilty of that for many years."

That's a big mistake, Galvin adds, because pension plans are a thing of the past. He says American workers are more dependent than ever on their 401(k)s for retirement savings, and they stand to lose money if their company contributes only once a year. "They’re going to suffer the loss of whatever benefit of compounding – that is having that money in their account earning interest for that whole year –would be." Add to that if you leave your job mid-year you can kiss the entire contribution goodbye.

Galvin says people deserve to know in advance when their employers stop making 401(k) matches with every paycheck, and why, so he’s asked two-dozen of the country’s major 401(k) providers to tell him by March 10th how many companies have switched to once a year. The largest of those providers, Fidelity Investments, tells Marketplace: it’s a small number – and mostly large employers.

"You have increased cost of benefits; that has to be covered," says economist Robert Merton, a Nobel Laureate in Economics and a Professor of Finance at MIT. He points out that some of the companies in question could be trying to avoid other, more painful cuts such as health care benefits, but he says they should be transparent about it. "You have to not look at the one act, you have to look at why they did it, or at least why they said they did it. Almost everything is a tradeoff, so being informed about it is helpful."

Massachusetts Secretary of State Galvin says Congress might have to get involved if more companies move to once-a-year matching.

At the Employee Benefits Research Institute, president Dallas Salisbury says the rising cost of health care could drive that trend, and workers should expect changes. "Overall costs in the economy and their overall pay package gets adjusted all the time," he says. "If they think they’re not being treated fairly then go look for a new job."

Salisbury says, bottom line, whether people choose to save enough money on their own is what will determine when and how they can retire.

The U.S. economy is not creating a whole lot of new jobs these days, but the country’s freelance ranks are growing. About a third of the American workforce has what the government calls "contingent" employment, and there’s a new industry looking to cash in on that upward trend.

Case in point: the Boston start-up OhYouHero. The company is headquartered in a Boston office building, where its founders are about to launch a website they say will help freelancers find work. OhYouHero members can build a virtual storefront and list their skills for prospective employers.

These freelancers can specialize in anything from dog-walking and personal shopping to online marketing and creative direction. Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer John Evans Maden not only designed the site -- he's also a client with an active profile.

"If you got in touch with me and said 'I need this done right now,' I would do it," he says.

As Evans Maden explains it, the company wants freelancers to think of themselves as "heroes for hire," instead of hustlers who "sometimes getting hustled" themselves.

"We think that it should be much, much, much easier to make a living in the United States, with all the technology we have."

Freelancers get paid through the site. The company takes an 8 percent cut, which Evans Maden says is below industry standard. For such a young industry, OhYouHero has a lot of competition.

Karpie adds that before the recession, there were about 24 job sites for freelancers. Now he puts the number at 80 -- or more.

"These online platform businesses are innovating, even revolutionizing, how those two sides of work supply and demand come together."

That matchmaking is just the start of this new relationship between freelancers and the free market. Once workers get jobs, other new companies want to sell them time-management software or billing services. New York-based Harvest offers online-invoicing, that sends automatic reminders when employers don’t pay.

"So people are picking up different tools that are allowing them to be really good at the business end stuff, as well as their core competency -- [what] they actually get paid for," says Jeremy Neuner, CEO of NextSpace.

The coworking company is one of a growing number of that offer shared office spaces -- where freelancers can be more productive than in their living rooms, and meet with clients they want to impress. Neuner says more than half of NextSpace members are self-employed.

"There’s such a huge market to serve, so we have every intention - we’re at nine locations now - to be ten times that size by the end of the decade."

By 2020, estimates show half the American workforce could be freelancing.

"Industry is realizing the freelancers, and what we call the independent workforce, has reached a scale that they want to serve it," says Steve King, a consultant at Emergent Research. For freelancers who can afford to be served, King says a lot of the new products are free or low-cost.

"We’re going to see freelancing [become] easier to do, which is good because it’s traditionally been hard."

For many freelancers, even a little less hustling could mean more time to enjoy some of the perks of self-employment.

*CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misattributed the company that experienced a 300 percent increase in freelancer customer base. New York-based Harvest was the firm that experienced the growth. The text has been corrected.

Technology is making all kinds of choices for us these days, like how Netflix and Pandora can use big data to tell us which movies and music we might like. Now, it’s changing the way job seekers and employers connect. Case in point: 21-year-old Isaiah Bien Aime*, a Boston College senior who’s on track to graduate this spring with a major economics.

He wants to get an MBA, but first he needs a job, so Bien Aime* signed on with AfterCollege.com. The free website sends college students and recent grads curated alerts with job and internship postings based on where and what they study.

It also allows employers to contact students directly. Bien Aime signed up a month ago and says he’s already had two interviews.

“I think they are capable of getting a sense of who I am as a person and tailoring my search to make sure that the jobs that they are posting are intriguing to me,” Bien Aime says.

The matchmaker at AfterCollege is a bunch of math; the website started in 1999 as a searchable job board and it’s kept track of who applied for what. Last year, the company fed all that data through an algorithm and started recommending jobs.

“You have basically a reduced likelihood that you’re going to end up in a job you don’t like, or that you’re going to become a worker that the employer doesn’t like,” says CEO Roberto Angulo.

AfterCollege is one of a growing number of companies that are developing high-tech tools for the job market. As the economy recovers millions of people still need jobs, and hiring methods are outdated, according to Rosemary Haefner, Vice President of Human Relations at CareerBuilder.com.“You send in a piece of paper, whether it’s through a job board and it’s electronic or hard copy, and it’s, ‘here’s my life story, please recruiter read it.’” She compares the interview process to going on a few dates, then getting married. “What these products that are coming into the marketplace are really saying, is that there are so many more important parts to figuring if it’s a match.”

A new company called Knack makes video games employers can use to analyze job applicants’ personalities and talents. In one game dubbed “Wasabi Waiter” you play a server in a busy sushi bar who has to multitask to keep customers happy.

“From that they can infer all sorts of characteristics about you like your perseverance and your creativity, even your extroversion,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, a Knack adviser and Director of MIT’s Center for Digital Business. “Those are things that don’t show up on your resume or your college transcript.”

Brynjolfsson says using big data to connect more companies with the right talent could have trillions of dollars in economic value. “Doing matchmaking for people’s careers and for the efficiency of companies and ultimately for the whole economy, that’s big money, and that’s something that’s going to hopefully lead to more fulfilling careers for a lot of people.”

He compares the way technology is opening up how companies work to what the microscope did for the study of biology. In the future, the future he believes more hiring decisions will be based on hard data, instead of software and gut reactions.

*CORRECTION: In an earlier version of this story, we misspelled the last name of Bien Aime. The text has been corrected.

Cyber Monday means lots of good deals online for holiday shoppers, but what if you’re back at work today?Turns out a growing number of companies don’t mind if employees try to bag some bargains from behind their desks.

The retail holiday got its name in 2005 from Shop.org (the online arm of the National Retail Federation) when retailers noticed a bump in online sales the Monday after Thanksgiving. At first a lot of companies blocked employees’ access to shopping sites that day. Now, 54 percent of firms allow workers to shop on the clock with IT teams watching for excessive use. That’s up 20 percent from three years ago according to an annual survey.

"Companies have really smartly said it’s okay to get a little personal business done as long as you are still productive on the job," says Kathy Northamer with Robert Half Technology, the IT staffing company that does the survey. "Companies have realized it’s helped them let their workers be more productive because they’re not taking off a whole day to cybershop."

At the Maryland web-consulting firm HindSite Interactive, company president Payman Taei doesn’t mind if staffers shop on Cyber Monday. "It’s one day a year, and you know this is not something that goes on on a daily basis, so why not take advantage of it and let everybody be happy," Taei says. He even tells his staff to tip him off to good deals. Last year he shopped for the company and saved 25 percent on an external hard drive.

These days it’s not just retailers trying to lure customers with good deals. For shoppers who build up an appetite, a lot of restaurants now offer Black Friday deals, like LongHorn Steakhouse and Red Lobster. A growing number of hotels want a piece of the action, too.

"Black Friday is not just a shopping day, it’s really a deal day," says Chekitan Dev, professor of marketing and Branding at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration."One of the reasons why hotels and restaurants are jumping on the BF bandwagon is because they’re looking to divert that spending from things to experiences," Dev says.

Case in point: the Trump Hotel Collection is offering 30 percent off suites booked between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

"More and more hospitality is actually coming into the forefront in terms of something you give as gift," says Eric Trump, executive vice president of acquisitions and development for the Trump Organization. "A lot of times people tired of the knitted sweater for lack of a better gift. They want that weekend in Las Vegas or Chicago or New York."

Bad weather leading up to today’s Thanksgiving holiday has been snarling travel at one of the busiest times of the year for the country’s airports, but many of them have come a long way toward making our time in the terminals a lot less stressful.

"There's more awareness of that passenger experience," says Julia Bradley Rayfield, a senior designer with Gresham Smith & partners whose specialty is airports and other "high-abuse" interiors. "There’s been a realization, I think, that there was revenue there if people spent a little more time in the airport and enjoyed themselves while they were there."

The signs are everywhere that the holiday season is upon us: Black Friday bargains, Cyber Monday steals, and those "skip a payment" offers from lenders that give consumers a month off from paying credit card bills, car payments, and other debt. Some of them come right out and say that you could use the extra money for holiday shopping.

So what's the catch?

"For lenders, it allows them to stretch out the loan," says Gerri Detweiler, director of consumer education for Credit.com. She says skipping a payment won’thurt your credit rating, but the amount you owe will increase. "You’re going to pay more interest and the loan will take you longer to pay off, so you’re sort of prolonging the agony, if you will."

Some consumers might not mind paying more in the end, but personal finance expert Lauren Lyons Cole says those who carry a credit card balance from month to month should never skip payments.

"That’s already an indication that you may have an overspending problem," Cole explains. "There are so many things you could do besides spending money that you don’t already have. You know you could… bake something for people, I mean that takes a lot of time, and everybody loves to eat."

A 16-pound turkey is the priciest item on the menu at $21 and 76 cents, and it turns out that’s a price drop.

"It's actually down $0.47 from year ago," says Federation economist John Anderson. One reason for the change, he adds, is that some retailers discount turkey to sell it as a loss leader. "Turkey is going to be the thing that most people are going to want to have as centerpiece of their meal, and so if, as a retailer, you can get people in your store to buy the turkey, it’s unlikely that that’s all they’re going to buy, right?"

Case in point: at Market Basket in Burlington, MA frozen store-brand birds are on sale for $0.59 per pound this week. (That's about $0.77 below the average price per pound.) In a high-traffic area of the store there are long freezer cases full of turkeys, flanked by bins of stuffing mix and cans of cranberry sauce stacked shoulder-high.

"Our slogan is more for your dollar," says Rob Harrington, a manager for the New England grocery store chain. "Our business doubles between now and Christmas. We know what sells, we know what people want during a particular season, so that’s what we put out."

It's kind of like Black Friday specials at department stores. Besides the retail markdown, wholesale turkey prices drop in the fourth quarter every year, says Corinne Alexander, professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University. "That's partly because the entire turkey industry gears up for delivering those supplies of turkey at Thanksgiving, so they go into that fourth quarter with large supplies in cold storage," Anderson explains.

The USDA says this year producers have about four percent more turkey on ice than last year. "The price they receive from consumers only goes up when the supply of what they’re producing comes down," says Alexander.

For now the bird is a bargain, but that cancels out if you like pumpkin pie; this year’s survey says most of the ingredients to make it will cost $3.20 more.

The winter season doesn’t officially start for another month and a half, but the snow is already flying in some parts of the country.

This time of year a lot of those flakes are man made in the Northeast, where the region’s ski resorts rely on snowmaking to keep customers on the slopes longer than ever.

The largest ski area east of the Rocky Mountains is in western Maine; in the last two years Sugarloaf Resort has spent almost $2 million dollars on the latest snowmaking technology. "When you have your season stretching from mid-November to mid-May, your guests start to expect that from you no matter what the weather is," says Sugarloaf spokesman Ethan Austin.

The resort spends another 5 to 10 percent of its winter operating budget on the energy to make snow, Austin adds. "It’s a big number. It all depends on what the energy costs are at any given time, and those fluctuate on a daily basis."

Ski resorts have supplemented Mother Nature for decades, but today’s snow guns make flakes more efficiently and in warmer weather.

So now, that’s how they compete, says Greg Sweetser, head of the Ski Maine Association. "It has truly been an arms race of who can make the most snow with the least amount of dollars."

Resorts also claim it’s harder to tell the difference from the real stuff.

But sometimes even the best technology falls short. "Insulating yourself from fluctuations of weather has become crucial over the last five years," says J.J. Toland, spokesman for Jay Peak Resort in northern Vermont, which recently built a 60-thousand square foot indoor water park. "We invented the weatherproof ski vacation, so to speak."

Now if there’s not enough snow, real or fake, skiers can pass the time surfing.

The country’s top financial official has his work cut out for him in Asia this week. U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew heads to Asia and he plans to press China on the value of its currency.

That's an effort that for years has gone nowhere. Undeterred by those long odds, Lew will also be working to convince U.S. trade partners in the region to reach agreement on an historic free trade deal by the end of this year. A proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, with twelve members along the Pacific Rim, make up almost 40 percent of the global economy.

The U.S., Japan, Malaysia and others have been trying to close the free trade deal for three years.

"It requires political compromise," says Robert Lawrence, Professor of International Trade and Finance at Harvard. "Generally in these cases people don’t do that until they have no other choices.People [of], you know, the Treasury Secretary’s stature are going to be what it takes to make these compromises politically feasible."

The would-be members have given themselves a deadline of six more weeks to reach consensus. And that leaves some with questions about its fate.

"We have a Congress that has not acted on a Farm Bill andwe have a number of restrictions other countries want to see lifted," says Jeff Schott, a senior fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "Everyone has something they're going to have to put into the pot."

]]>Tue, 12 Nov 2013 09:05:59 GMTVeterans Day deals: From national parks to coffeehttp://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/veterans-day-deals-national-parks-coffee

Most holidays give businesses another excuse to target all consumers, but Veterans Day is different.

"This is actually something that people put lives on line typically, then earn the right to really celebrate," says David Berkowitz, Chief Marketing Officer for the New York marketing firm MRY.

Berkowitz says the holiday does give the rest of us a chance to recognize the country's 21.9 million veterans, but there are no hard rules for businesses that want to do it with discounts.

"It is going to be a bit of a moving target," he explains. "It’s not like 10 percent off is enough, but 20 percent -- that’s great. What is something that is a bit above and beyond what someone will find in a typical circular, or that veterans will be especially excited about. If it's something really good they'll want to spread the word about it, so another thing that's also really important today is having that hook to make it easy to share."

Military.com lists dozens of discounts this year for veterans and their families - everything from free admission to National Parks to a free meal at Hooters. But where’s the line between recognizing military service and boosting profit margins?

"We exist in a marketplace where consumers are very much concerned with authenticity," says Kelly Martin, Associate Professor of Marketing and Ethics at Colorado State University. She says it’s hard to tell which companies are trying to recognize veterans and which ones just want their money. "A lot of it comes down to how it makes them feel, right? If it doesn’t feel authentic, my guess is that it’s probably not."

Regardless of intent many veterans are grateful for the discounts, according to Joe Davis, spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW).

"Military folks, I mean they’re not driving up to these restaurants in Mercedes," says Davis. "For the most part, a lot of them are living paycheck to paycheck, so any discount that any commercial business can provide them is a good discount.